“I had journalists asking me if this meant I was coming out, if I was a lesbian now,” she tells the U.K.’s Independent. “That haircut did make me realize how subjective everyone’s opinion is. Some people were crazy for it and some people just thought I’d lost my [mind].”

The 21-year-old face of Lancôme says that her red carpet style is also hotly contested. After graduating from the Potter franchise, “I was fully game for ‘Throw me in this, throw me in that,'” she admits. “The press destroyed me over this Rodarte dress I once wore — it was bright blue with chains on it.” Still, she doesn’t consider the edgy look a mistake: “I loved it.”

But perhaps Watson has decided to tone it down as a result of the negativity. “I have to be more careful with my look in my everyday life,” she recently lamented to French Elle.

Still, she refuses to apologize for the decisions she makes. “I’m a multidimensional person and that’s the freedom of fashion,” she says, “that you’re able to reinvent yourself through how you dress and how you cut your hair or whatever.”